Never trust a GPS (Oct 16)

NOTES FROM THE SCOTCH COLONY

Giving advice to caterpillars

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we decide to live in Canada year-round rather than be rich and spend the winter in Costa Rica or the sunshine coast of Portugal.

            Of course all coasts of Portugal are sunshine coasts, but you know what I mean. I got up this morning and glanced at the thermometer to see that it read ten degrees. Brrrrrrr! Then I remembered about that metric system thing and realized that ten degrees in this new (since 1975) system represents fifty degrees on the real scale. I felt warmer already.

            Of course shaky feelings about the weather are even more upsetting when I realize we’re in the middle of an election campaign, an event that leads one to remember that it was a Trudeau who drove us into the metric system. It’s hard to separate those two occurrences – taking away our beloved Imperial system of measure, and that name that will soon appear on the federal ballot.

            Moving on to another subject, we in the Scotch Colony are mourning the loss of one of our dearest friends – Gailen Haymaker. We were sitting around the club last evening and remembering Gailen who served on several committees of the club. He was on the Rum Committee, the Vodka Committee, the Red Wine Committee and the Snow Removal Committee. There may have been more; it was hard to pin him down.

            “He was a good old boy,” commented the Perfessor, and the rest of us echoed that thought. Colin Hardesty said that Gailen was “one in ten million”, which overstated the population of the colony, the county and even the province, and Glenn Gannon said that Gailen “would be missed, especially by people whose rifles don’t have telescopic sights”. That was his idea of a joke.

            Here’s what happened to put us all in the position of missing Gailen Haymaker: You may have misled yourself into thinking that Gailen is dead, but no indeed, he is not, although he may as well be; he’s in Flin Flon, Manitoba.

            Blame it all on his GPS, an instrument he has relied on for years to get him from the Colony to far-flung corners of Canada. Twelve days ago we said our goodbyes at the club as he started off toward his Uncle George’s split-level log house in Thunder Bay, Ontario.

            You might ask yourself how Gailen, aiming for Thunder Bay, could possibly end up in Flin Flon, one of the dreariest communities in Manitoba and I can tell you right away – GPS.

            Something happened to that instrument around Aroostook (similar to what might befall newly elected politicians) that threw all its calculations for a tailspin. He first noticed something was out of whack around Elliott Lake, Ontario and then Agawa Bay, where an arrow and a sign told him he was looking at Lake Superior, a name that I’ve often thought was somewhat pretentious.

            A couple of tanks of gas later, his GPS informed him that he was in a place called Winnipeg, Manitoba, which he felt was a little out of his range if he wanted to land his Gremlin at Thunder Bay, Ontario. That’s a different province isn’t it?

            He kept going though, because his GPS was saying “go west young” and Gailen had never been strong of geography. Later – much later - that day he came to a sign that said “41 kilometres to Saskatchewan” and he entered a town called Flin Flon.

            “It should be called ‘pollution’ he muttered, as he looked around the area and found his eyes stinging from the sulfur dioxide and mercury tricentrate – although he didn’t know their names at that point.

            Gailen stopped at a garage. “How far to Thunder Bay?” he asked a woman who was changing a tire on an elderly Gremlin.

            She pointed in the direction he had come from: “About ten or fifteen hours back there,” she said. “Where you from, anyway?”

            “Cargill, Minnesota,” he said, thinking of the embarrassment he was saving all of us back home. “Going to a wedding.”

            “Let me guess,” she said. “You followed the directions of your GPS. You’re the fourth one this week. You’re from Victoria County New Brunswick, aren’t you?” He admitted it, just as, a month before, I had had to make the same admission to a Maine border patrol officer near Fort Kent. I had been heading for Fredericton from the Colony.

            To sum up, let me leave you with this lesson: NEVER trust a GPS unless you like driving.

                                                ***********************

            Now we will go on to a more important topic – road caterpillars.

            I do a lot of walking along the roads – which makes a lot of sense when you think about it – and some things I see a lot of are caterpillars crawling from one side of the road to the other. Usually.

            On Sunday morning I counted them. In a distance of about two kilometres I spied 14 of those fuzzy beasts making their way along the chipsealed Manse Hill Road. Six of them were going from south to north, six of them were crawling from north to south, one of them was going up the road (east) and one was going right down the road (west).

            If I could have handed out some advice to the ones going parallel to the road, I would have said you ain’t never gonna get there, but caterpillars are famous for not paying any attention to humans unless the human is driving an SUV.

            I should mention that in twelve of the cases I picked up the beast and threw it across the road, but in the two east-west cases I let them be. You can’t tell a caterpillar anything because it won’t listen.